The Misery of Bliss

Soon I am off to a book group discussion in a Nursing Home...er, rather, a Skilled Nursing Facility, or SNF, usually called a Sniff  but renamed a Snuff or Snurf by Susan. Sweet P-Dub has to do a week or so of rehab due to her broken hip due to her tangle with a wild dog in the middle of the night at the O-K Ryder Corrall.  I know her physical therapist who will not violate her constitutional rights not to exercise (Amendment 74 I suppose?) and she is going to do just fine.

Since P-Dub can't come to the book club, we are bringing the book club to P-Dub. 

Wine, which is kind of required at book club, is not allowed at the SNF.  But juice is allowed.  And P-Dub has a private room.  So we will be drinking some juice (wink wink nudge nudge say no more say no more) out of coffee mugs with lids to keep that special juice aroma from the nurses at the Snurf who might Sniff the juice and end our meeting prematurely.    We will not be dipping Snuff at the Sniff.  I'm sure!  P-Dub will be on pain pills so no juice for the Sweet P.

The book we are dissing, I mean discussing, is The Geography of Bliss.  This book alternately pleased me and bugged me.  Here is an example of the bugging me part, from a chapter on Iceland that I mostly enjoyed except for these annoying interjections of "aren't I clever" by the author.  (He can't help it probably.  His last name is Weiner and at least he doesn't tweet any photos of his body parts, at least not that we have heard.)

Not see the sun?  I don't like the way that sounds.  In the past the sun has always been there for me, the one celestial body I could count on.  Unlike Pluto, which for decades led me to believe it was an actual planet when the whole time it was really only a dwarf planet.

How does this bug me?  Let me count the ways. 
1.  Who cares what you as the author feel about Pluto, in a book about Happiness around the Earthly Plane?
2.  Anthropomorphizing planetary behavior is so 1970s.
3.  I think Weiner is biased against little people and planets.  Probably has some Munchkin Issues.
4.  There are so many I am afraid to go on.

On any page I can find a line or two that delight me, and a paragraph or four that irk me.  Too much of the author and his advertisements for his own cleverness in the book.

Just to be fair here are a couple sentences from a paragraph in the same chapter that I really like:

Necessity may be the mother of invention, but interdependence is the mother of affection....We help other people because we can, or because it makes us feel good, not because we're counting on some future payback.  There is a word for this:  love.

S'nuff Said.